My internship at the Pediatric unit

We’ve had our first two days at the new department: pediatrics in-patient. This department is for kids who stay in the hospital for a night or more. Also the premature baby’s are at this department.

We started our day with taking the vitals from the premature babies, they are so small and for me, this is the most special unit! It is so extraordinary to see how those little humans are being alive and some of them so strong!

This morning a little girl was born with a c-section, she wasn’t breading at here own at first. A few minutes laten, when she arrived at my unit she was doing a lot better but here oxygen was way to low (87% instead of >95%). She needed to get extra oxygen true a mask but the power in the hospital didn’t work so neither was the oxygen machine...
luckily the power went on a few minutes later because the generator of the hospital broke a few years ago and they don’t have money for a new one. So we couldn’t do anything to help the little girl for those first minutes.

Later this afternoon I checked on here and she was totally fine. For us is it quite hard to see and frustrating to just leave a patient in a situation like this, especially when it’s a just born little girl without here mother of any other family.

The reason we have to ‘leave her’ in a moment like this is that there are so many other patients (yesterday 41) who we can and need to help. The people here are more used to those situations and stay really calm, while we kept worrying about this little patient.

Those other 41 patients are all with there mother, they stayed the whole time, feed them, take care of them and spent the night in the same bed as there sick kids (most of the time with 4 people in one bed). That the mother and other relatives take such good care of each other is very beautiful, the mothers of theirs children but also of other patients. When somebody has pain, they give each other tea. The black tea they drink here is for strength. And they talk a lot to each other, even have some fun.

After we took the viral signs of the premature babies we helped the doctor with here rounds. We even had a computer and a look-a-like nursing health care plan! This was very interesting and nice to see, its not as developed as our health care plans in Holland but they are working on it and they have a system that works. We did felt more as nurses than at the maternity unit.

In the doctors rounds we take vital signs, talk with the mother how the patient is doing and make a new plan with the doctor. Some kids like to play a little with you but others are really afraid.
We measure the temperature under the armpit. there is no money for another and anal is not an option because there are not enough cleaning agents.

One girls was really, really afraid of everything… Even the saturation meter around her finger. I tried to explain to here that it wouldn’t hurt, showed it on myself and then she conquered her fear and we did it together. Really amazing it was to see how I could help even we didn’t spoke the same language.
This is one of the things I went to Tanzania for, to learn how to do my job even how limited we are here, and learn to be creative.

Tomorrow we will have another they at this department with certainly more stories and hopefully more patients we can help.